


the things we carry

by gandrshot



Series: a fever dream [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Courier is Lone Wanderer | Lone Wanderer is Courier, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Medical Procedures, Platonic Female/Male Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 15:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13661412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gandrshot/pseuds/gandrshot
Summary: Two thousand miles apart, in the midst of two different wars, and perhaps with a few year's difference, Boone and the Courier walked the same road, and it burned into them the same heartache.





	the things we carry

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was previously titled "a thousand roads" but at the time there wasn't anything between it and the first fic in the series, and i wasn't keen on leaving two road-themed titles in the row.
> 
> as of 11/7/18 edits have been made to fix small details of her backstory in prep for future updates to the series.

Sand whipped the side of the decrepit old gas station as wild winds raged across the Mojave outside. It was a good thing they got in when they did - sand against an open wound was the last thing Cosima wanted to deal with today, and it wasn't even her shoulder.

 

Boone crashed against the counter as soon as he could, using it to support his weight as he clutched the bullet hole in his shoulder, blood staining his shirt and his hand, and he hissed against the searing pain. He could still feel the damn bullet in him.

 

It took Cosima only a moment to screen the place, make sure nothing was going to jump out at her while she was knuckle-deep in his flesh, but the small convenience store was secure and empty.

 

"Come here and hold this light," she commanded to ED-E, who whirred and beeped some response Boone didn't understand but took its place where she pointed beside her anyways, letting her dangle her Pip-Boy from its blaster, and the courier got to work helping him pull himself up onto the counter to sit, a far better alternative to trying to stand there while she dug around in his shoulder. Her jacket and gloves found themselves discarded, thrown across a shelf behind them, before she turned to dig out some supplies from her bag that had since been discarded on the floor. Boone did his best, too, to work his way out of his shirt, but the bullet ground against something wrong when he lifted his shoulder and it was all he could do to bite back a shout.

 

"Hey, hey, leave it, I'll just cut it off. You have others, it's fine."

 

And fair, he did, but who wanted to ruin a perfectly good one? Still, he dropped his arms, letting his shoulder sag till she could come over with a pair of scissors from the doctor's bag and cut cleanly up the side.

 

"Sorry about this." It was a lot easier having it cleanly shorn away, though, than trying to manage his way out of it himself, and he was thankful for that.

 

The scraps, she tossed aside. Maybe he'd grab them on the way out; they'd make useful bandages or rags later, in a pinch, though for now, they were garbage, really. Especially with how bloodied they'd gotten.

 

Boone watched her scrub her hands clean, first with vodka, then with clean water. There wasn't a lot of dirt or dust on them in the first place - a little was inevitable in the Mojave, where sand got fucking _everywhere_  - and he wondered if she wore the gloves to keep her hands as clean as she could for situations like these. Her hands were practiced, sterilizing her forceps with the same bottle of vodka before gently pulling at the side of the wound with her free hand. Boone hissed.

 

"I know you said no Med-X, but..."

 

_"No Med-X,"_ he echoed, insistence stern. He didn't need to explain why. First Recon, having served with the NCR for years, he wasn't the type to take kindly to being pulled out of his head like that. And Med-X, where it dulled the pain, dulled the mind, too. Even Cosima avoided it for herself when she could. Sometimes it was just worth the cost to stay in control of your senses. Still - bullet holes were a hell of a thing to be digging around in and stitching back up. Maybe if they'd been traveling together longer, if he trusted her a little bit more, his answer would be different.

 

"Just tell me if you change your mind."

 

She took her time irrigating the wound, flushing the worst of the blood out to give her more room to work, a spare rag she had catching the mess she made as he bit down on the inside of his cheek to stay composed. The bullet went deep, but not deep enough to find its way back out, unfortunately, and it took a lot of gentle digging to finally catch the familiar glint of copper deep inside the flesh of his shoulder. Boone clutched the counter, white-knuckled, so hard she was certain he might hurt himself, getting by only through a litany of expletives no matter how careful she thought she was being. By the time she finally got the bullet out, dropping it bloody and unceremoniously into a little metal dish from the doctor's bag, he was white as a sheet.

 

"That's the worst of it," she reassured gently, like a mother might talk to a child who'd just gotten a shot. She had a remarkable bedside manner, gentle and precise in each of her movements even for the tremble in her hands, and not afraid to stitch him up without putting him at least halfway under. This wasn't the first time she'd done this, but it was more than that - she wasn't just some field medic, some kid who knew her way around a suture only because she'd walked the wasteland enough times to know what getting shot felt like.

 

"Where'd you get your medical training, six?" He had to ask. She glanced up at him with a frown at the nickname, hands busy cleaning the area around the wound and sterilizing the injection site for where she was about to stick a stimpak in him. She didn't answer for a moment - he wasn't sure if she was just too occupied to answer, or if she was thinking over the question in her head.

 

"I was supposed to become my vault's next doctor," she replied eventually. It was the last answer he expected.

 

"You grew up in a vault?"

 

"Yeah." The stimpak went in easy, only pinching at first, and immediately the pain began to subside. Not completely, not like the Med-X would do, but enough to make him loosen his grip on the counter and breathe out a sigh of relief. It never stopped being foreign and strange, the feeling of skin knitting itself back together in a matter of seconds, but with the bullet free of the wound his skin reconnected like wax melted together.

 

Cosima didn't seem the kind to come from a vault - she was as hardened by the wasteland as any, and nearly as good a shot as he was. She wasn't soft, or gullible, or any of the vault dweller stereotypes; those that survived their vaults usually did so because it wasn't one of the horror shows that Vault-Tec put on, but instead a cushioned, safe environment, leagues different from the hell outside its doors. Vault dwellers almost never wound up the kind of woman Cosima was.

 

"What vault?"

 

"101."

 

"Where's that at?" It wasn't a local vault, or one from out west, that was for sure - though, Cosima didn't seem local, so that tracked.

 

"Way out east - Capital Wasteland. In D.C."

 

Boone raised his eyebrows. "What the hell brought you all the way out here?"

 

"I, uh..." As Cosima discarded the empty stimpak, she rubbed the back of her neck, frowning, unsure of how exactly to answer. It felt stupid - especially when talking to someone like Boone, who she knew so little about she couldn't imagine how he'd answer. He'd lost his family, too - maybe he'd think her a coward for running away.

 

Digging out a fresh shirt for him and finding a place to lean up against the counter beside him, as he tugged the thing on she crossed her arms over her chest, looking straight down. "My dad died. He was a doctor and a scientist who'd worked on building this massive water purifier meant to clean up the Potomac, so that the people could finally have a reliable source of clean water, but... you know. A lot of people set their eyes on it. I guess a lot like how things are out here with the dam, huh?"

 

Boone didn't dare say anything - losing family was a raw wound for him, too, he knew how it felt to get talked over. He just let her talk.

 

"The Enclave killed him taking over the water purifier, so I... helped the Brotherhood push them out so we could finish what he started. I was the closest to the project, after all, I knew it best and it felt like it was my responsibility to finish it. But by the time was all said and done, and everything was completed and put into the hands of the Brotherhood, I just... didn't feel like I had a place there anymore. All I had left was hunting the Enclave. D.C. made me feel trapped, so I just... went west one day." She thought it best not to mention Butch, Fawkes - how she just left them behind. How they should have tied her down and made her feel like she had a place, and they just... couldn't.

 

"I guess I had half a mind to become a doctor in some far away settlement and bury my past once I was done with the Enclave? But I never found anywhere that needed me where I had the stomach to stay," she went on. "It's hard to explain. I guess it's stupid, huh?"

 

"No. It's not." His reply was curt, but it was exactly what she needed. Cosima bit her lip, eyes welling up, willing her voice desperately not to crack.

 

"I just wanted somewhere that felt like home." She failed, voice breaking, and one hand immediately went up to cover her eyes. 

 

For a long moment, Boone hesitated - this wasn't how he expected this conversation to go. It started, after all, with what he _thought_  was a more than innocuous question, but maybe not. They'd only known each maybe a week - traveled with each other for less - but... it still felt okay to reach over, still-sore shoulder protesting as he lifted it to wrap an arm around her shoulders. Any doubts about the decision disappeared when she leaned into him, shoulders shaking as she tried her damnedest - and, mostly, failed - not to break down in front of him.

 

* * *

Even after an hour, the sandstorm outside raged, though at the very least, the dull ache in Boone's shoulder that came with getting shot and then put back together apace had all but subsided. He and Cosima found themselves against the wall, sat on the ground and passing between them a bottle of whiskey she'd originally pulled out if he needed something to take the edge off while she dug around in his shoulder. Drinking was slow - they'd have to be on the road again when the storm passed, after all, but it didn't look like it'd be letting up for hours yet, so one bottle couldn't possibly hurt.

 

At this point, she'd already cried her eyes out in front of him, so she thought - _hey, why the hell not?_  And opening up about the Enclave came easy when it was to him, she found. Spilling her guts about the monsters that they were - the mass genocide they wanted to commit on the wasteland, the way she blew their base to shit and later hunted down the scraps that remained, tracked them to Adams Air Force Base and destroyed the last of their arsenal along the East Coast. The destruction of the mobile crawler base was crippling - between that and her relentless pursuit through Chicago and the wastelands of the midwest, as far as she was aware, the Enclave in the east never truly recovered, faded into obscurity as she rolled over them. She considered it a job well done.

 

She was honest with him - it was personal, on some level. It always had been. No matter what monsters they were, no matter how justified she felt she was, it was always personal, on the deepest level beneath the skin. She could look him in the eye - as well as she could with his glasses on, anyways - and admit that. Though, she realized, he may have been the first she said it to.

 

He understood the vendetta. It was the Legion, for him. Of course they were monsters, of course their extermination was justified - but the passion with which he made each kill, the hatred in his heart he had to fight not to let rage like an out of control wildfire, that was personal. That was for Carla. Cosima nodded solemnly as she watched the way his eyes darkened when he talked about it - it was a level of understanding they had of each other neither of them had found with anyone else yet so far.

 

He wouldn't share with her Bitter Springs, or the darkest of the details when it came to Carla, not quite yet. Those were deeper scars, ones he wasn't quite ready to cut back into - certainly not with her, merely a fresh acquaintance but not necessarily with anyone else, either. Instead, he told her about the milder parts of his tour with the NCR. Recounting how, when he was stationed at Camp Golf, a pair or two from 1st Recon would get cazador hunting duty in the evening to keep them from crossing the lake and terrorizing grunts and ill-equipped officers. How one evening, he almost managed to kill Vulpes Inculta himself, but he lost his line of sight before his bullet could connect with the bastard's head. How he met Carla at a blackjack table in the Tops on leave one night, how he didn't believe in love at first sight till she sat down next to him and the rest was history.

 

Cosima listened intently - even if they'd traveled only little more than five days together, she knew already he wasn't the kind who talked much. And he still wasn't - his stories weren't grand epics woven with all the eloquence of Homer himself; rather, concise and curt, even in the way he structured his sentences. He told just enough for her to know what he was trying to get across, seldom a detail more - except for when he talked about Carla. God, he definitely loved Carla with everything he had. It showed more than anything else.

 

"What about you?" Somewhere along the line, Boone seemed to shift the subject, and she looked to him with a curious frown. "I guess you never got married or tried to settle down, huh?"

 

"No, no." She laughed once, ducking her head and tucking her hair behind her ears. "I've only ever been in two relationships anyways, and neither of them wound up right. I think it's too soon for me."

 

"Some more than most get."

 

"Yeah." Cosima lifted her head to stare at a point on the ceiling aimlessly. He didn't ask her to, but she continued anyway. "Both I grew up with. Amata was the first girl. She was... hmm." She could find no way more eloquent to put it than, "Incredible. Deserved a lot better."

 

_"Hey."_

 

"I did something really awful to her," she insisted, "when I left the vault. I don't think I could have ever gone back from it."

 

Boone didn't press her for it when she left it at that, and she was thankful for it, because she was already sick to her stomach as flashes of Overseer Almodovar's lifeless body laying on the ground returned to her mind without permission.

 

"Second was Butch, he was... an asshole?" She laughed, hollow. "That's not fair to him. We hated each other growing up but he matured a lot when he left the vault. Left after I did, but not to chase after me - he just hated it there. He was... sweet, when it came down to it. Had a heart. A weird sense of morals, but they were there in the end, you know?"

 

The way her tone fell sad at the end, almost heartbroken, he knew better than to press her on him, either.

 

* * *

Boone had actually dozed by the time the sandstorm cleared. Not fallen asleep properly - after years in the NCR, he wasn't sure he was capable of going out cold anymore - but alert, even through his little cat nap. It was the death of the howling wind that woke him, in fact, the slow shift in sound to eventual quiet kicking his brain into panic mode, telling him _something changed, so something's very wrong, get up now,_ and he jolted awake, the hands crossed over his chest jumping for his rifle the first chance they got. But as soon as he gathered his wits about him, he realized there was no panic to be had - ED-E continued to watch the door, Cosima sat fiddling idly with her lighter, crosslegged a few feet away. When Boone startled awake, she looked his way, eyebrows raised, nonplussed.

 

"All okay?"

 

"Didn't mean to doze," he replied, rubbing his stiff neck. At least his shoulder didn't ache anymore. "Time is it?"

 

"It's, uhh." Cosima reached for the Pip-Boy she'd since recovered from ED-E but hadn't put back on, tabbing over to check the time. "4:30."

 

"Shit."

 

"It's okay, we still have a few hours left of daylight. Let's shake it, though, close the distance between here and Vegas as much as we can."

 

Boone nodded, letting his joints pop as he stood and started collecting his things. He wasn't arguing with that.


End file.
